Saturday, October 18, 2014

Two dinosaur toes lead to fossil find in Badlands

Meat-eating biped unearthed on hillside died 75 million years ago

When Clive Coy saw two small fossilized dinosaur toes sticking out
the side of a hill in the Badlands, he hoped the remains of an entire
animal were waiting to be unearthed.
The fossil of the small,
meat-eating biped that Coy and other University of Alberta
paleontologists excavated last month appears to be a saurornitholestes,
but Coy and lead paleontologist Philip Currie said they haven't studied
it enough to provide any details yet.
Back at the U of A, Coy is
meticulously cleaning away the ancient mud and sand that have encased
the little raptor for 75 million years. He couldn't yet say if it was
indeed a complete skeleton.
"Something I've always enjoyed when
I'm doing the preparation work is knowing I'm the first human being to
see this," said Coy, who is the senior technician in the university's
Vertebrate Paleontology Department.
The only mammals in existence
in the late Cretaceous era, when Coy's dinosaur was alive, were mouse and
opossum-sized creatures, and they were already nothing but fossils when
humanity's earliest ancestors emerged.
"This animal is a fossil
and now our (mammalian) ancestors are fossils ... Down the evolutionary
chain, there's me digging up this creature that died 75 million years
ago," Coy said.
Paleontologists Coy, Currie and Eva Koppelhus led
last June's expedition with 15 other members of the international
Explorers Club.
"We found a lot of good material, (including) half
a dozen other skeletons that we need to investigate," Coy said. "This
one was promising enough that we made a special trip out two weeks ago
to dig down to see what this was."